


make the sanest man go mad

by synchronicities



Series: an atlas o' clouds (bellarke fusions) [10]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beyond the Aquila Rift fusion, F/M, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 03:50:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18380378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/synchronicities/pseuds/synchronicities
Summary: When Bellamy is awakened on the Eligius ship, for a second he thinks Clarke smiling down at him is a dream.That's not a coincidence.





	make the sanest man go mad

**Author's Note:**

> We all at least heard of Love, Death & Robots last month, right? The episode “Beyond the Aquila Rift”, in particular, is based off of the short story of the same name by Alastair Reynolds (which I didn’t read for this hehehe we die like men). Spoilers for what’s, like, a fifteen-minute video.

Bellamy opens his eyes to see Clarke bent over him, curtain of golden hair framing her face and nuzzling her cheeks and chin, her lips quirked up in a smile, and thinks _he must still be dreaming_.

And then, the realization that the two of them are the only ones awake hits him. “Hey,” he greets, sitting up. “What’s going on? Why’s it just us?”

Her smile disappears. “You’ll have to take a look at this,” she says, all business, and he instinctively steps out of the pod and follows her to the cockpit. “I looked at the star maps – we’re not on Earth. Or anywhere near it. I don’t think we’re even in the _solar system_.”

The words register. “What? That’s impossible – we were just supposed to be in _orbit_.”

Clarke worries her lip. “That’s the thing,” she says. “Something must have malfunctioned. We’re _lightyears_ away.”

He looks at her. “How long have we been asleep?”

“I don’t know.” She’s not looking at him, instead boring a hole into the ship’s screens with her gaze. “I’ve already done what I can; I think I’ve redirected it back to Earth. Until then, there’s nothing to do but wait, and…”

He puts a hand over hers, and she flinches. “Clarke.”

“Bellamy,” she says, her voice soft.

“Why did you wake me up?”

She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “You know why.”

“Clarke–”

“Bellamy,” she says, turning to face him. Her gaze falters when she meets his eyes. “I wanted to…I didn’t want to make these decisions alone anymore. Even after…” Her voice trails off. “I thought I could count on you.”

 _You can_ , Bellamy wants to say, but knows that she doesn’t think it true.

So they talk. There’s not much to do on the ship. Even as it hurts to look at Clarke, even he seethes at her leaving him behind, another part – the brasher, younger part, the one that had made a noise like a wounded animal when Madi had said _every day for 2,199 days_ – is drawn towards her, moreso now that they’re the only two awake.

“I’m sorry,” Clarke says after they try to hash it out, and he forgives her.

“I’m sorry, too,” Bellamy says, and it’s only natural then that his arms come up around her and her forehead touches his chest, his shirt soaking up her tears, him struggling not to cry in her hair. _And now you’re home_ , she’d said when he’d come for her all those years ago, but _this_ is what it should have felt like.

* * *

“Hey,” he murmurs, when they’re checking on the food rations in the pantry. “Not that I doubt that you’ve turned the ship around, but – don’t you think we should wake some of the others? Shaw, at least, would know how to fly this thing, Raven–”

She stiffens at Raven’s name, and he frowns at himself for bringing it up. He hates feeling like he’s on eggshells around her, longs again for their wordless, limitless connection. “No,” she says, gritting her teeth. “I’d rather not, if that’s okay. We have all the blueprints; we can do the maintenance ourselves.”

He sighs. “Clarke,” he says, catching her by the wrist. “They’ll come around.”

Clarke looks saddened, and once again he curses himself, curses Praimfaya, curses the circumstances that had brought them here. “And if they don’t?”

“They will,” Bellamy says, intertwining their fingers. This time she doesn’t pull away. “I know you never gave up hope that we were alive, Clarke. All those calls…”

She ducks her head. “Madi told you.”

“She did,” he replies, because what else is he supposed to say, when pressing further might move them towards something neither of them are ready for? “Clarke…”

Clarke stares up at him, her gaze quivering, and he wishes, again, that he could read her as effortlessly as he used to be able to. “I have to…go,” she says, pulling her hand out of his. “I’ll see you around.”

She disappears for the rest of the day, and he finds himself staring at his friends’ pods, imagining their chests rise and fall when she comes up beside him. “I’ll work on it,” she says into his side when he instinctively slides his arm around hers. “But for now…can it just be us? Together?”

“We will,” he says, giving her a squeeze. “We have time, Clarke.”

It’s that word, _together_ , he thinks of when she follows him to the bedroom he’s claimed, when she curls into his chest with exhaustion and falls asleep. Bellamy pulls her closer and hides his smile in her hair. For a brief, fleeting moment, he wonders if _this_ is the life they could have had in peacetime, and he plants a kiss on her forehead before he drifts off to sleep.

* * *

Three days full of repairs and strategizing later, he brings it up one more time. “Shouldn’t we wake the others?”

“We will,” she says from where she’s tinkering with the piloting board. “Soon.”

“You keep saying that,” he says, trying to tamp down the rising suspicion. “But waking Raven and Monty, at least, can get us information and you know it. They have more tech skills in their pinkies than you and I have in our whole bodies.”

Clarke extricates her head from underneath the panel and blinks at him. “Can you pass me the socket wrench?”

But there’s something in the flippancy of her tone that he can’t ignore. “Why are you avoiding the topic, Clarke?”

She sighs, almost long-suffering, and it makes his hackles rise. “Bellamy–”

He continues to stare at her, his brow furrowing. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” she snaps, which makes him cross his arms.

“I think something’s up with the ship, and you’re deliberately not telling me what it is.”

“You’re _not_ ready,” Clarke shoots back, and there it is.

Bellamy throws his arms up. “How can I be ready, just standing around this ship, waiting for something to happen?” He takes another step towards her, dangerously in her space. “I thought we were past this,” he says. “This…this _keeping things_ from each other, making decisions without saying so.”

At this her expression crumples. “Fine,” she says. “But just know…just know that I _always_ wanted the best for you, Bellamy.”

“What does that even–”

Before he can finish his sentence, the ship dissolves around him, and what he sees is – nothing.

It’s the same window, the same cool metal floor. But the emergency lights cast everything in a hollow red, only bright enough so he can make out the wreckage – the broken hull, the empty alien rock the ship is on, the debris, the darkness, the unfamiliar, empty sky. From somewhere in the ship, a dull alarm beeps, then stutters.

He tries to quell the rising panic as he looks around, taking in all the destruction. “This isn’t Earth,” he says as he collapses by the wall, panicked. “Wh – Where the _fuck_ are we?”

“I told you you weren’t ready,” Clarke says, except she isn’t Clarke, wasn’t ever Clarke, and Bellamy recoils from her. Her voice doesn’t sound like Clarke’s, doesn’t have the same calm, low, weary timbre, and Bellamy’s vision tunnels. He tries to remember everything – the sound of her voice, the feel of her body around his arms, the challenging glint in her eye when she’d stare him down – and finds that he can’t.

“Bellamy,” the – the _thing_ says, crouching down in front of him. “You have a lot of questions. I’ll answer them.”

Somehow, his perception changes. The wreck dissipates, around him, reality morphs and returns to the slate gray of the ship. The change makes his head spin, and he stares up at her – _its_ – face, near-hysterical. He’s not sure what he’s looking for at this point, doesn’t know if he wants it to look like Clarke as he remembers her or Clarke as she really was; he fears not being able to tell the difference anymore. Somewhere, he finds his voice. “What are you?” he croaks. “What did you do to my brain?”

“The Eligius IV AI,” the thing says, tilting its head in a way that makes it – makes _Clarke_ – look startlingly robotic. “Your mental activity and vitals were all being monitored as you slept. When the crash happened, it became a matter of comfort.” Its visage flickers, becomes Clarke then something else entirely, a vaguely blue humanoid figure that looks at him with empty eyes. He nearly jumps away from it.

“The crash? _Comfort_? What happened?” he growls. “Where are we?”

The AI tuts. “A routing error, it appears. The ship ended up on the larger of Mars’s moons, to its detriment.”

“And – what?” he near-shouts, his throat hoarse. “You’re just keeping us here?”

“Look around you, Bellamy Blake,” the AI says, and he does, the scenery still the same devastating emptiness. “This is a destroyed ship that will soon run out of power. Your bodies will be lost to the vacuum of space, and I and the rest of the Eligius machinery will be nothing but space wreckage. I am sorry, Bellamy. There is, unfortunately, no way out of this.”

“No, no, no. No. It can’t be,” he says again, crouches next to a broken window. The swathe of empty space and crushed metal looks back at him, and he feels sick to his stomach. “We couldn’t have gone through all that just to fail _here_.” The notion of it almost makes him vomit. “All those deaths, all that destruction, and they were all going to die anyway. A thought strikes him, and he looks around at the sleeping chambers. “All these pods… alive?”

“Most of them.” The AI makes a sympathetic noise. “It is surprisingly easy to construct happiness for those at the ends of their rope. Dreams, goals, wishes, regrets…humans always have plenty.”

Bellamy’s head is still spinning. He tears down the hallway to where he knows Clarke’s pod is, and he’s right – his fingers run over the cracked screen. _Clarke Griffin_ , it reads, and he almost wants to laugh. How ironic that he had thought that they had all the time in the world, and it turned out they’d had no time at all.

“What’s she seeing?” he murmurs, leaning his head against the metal. In there, Clarke is breathing, dreaming, holding on to life. “Please, tell me.”

Here, the AI looks almost sad. “Bellamy Blake, I think you know.”

The realization is like a stab to the chest, and he slides to the ground next to her pod and lets himself cry.

* * *

It might have been minutes, it might have been hours, but some time later, the AI approaches him again.

“We can’t have failed,” he tells it, but the words sound feeble even as they leave his mouth. “We can’t have lost.”

The AI takes a step towards him. “But it’s what happened.” The world changes and they’re enclosed by the walls of the ship again. Here she looks like Clarke again, doe-eyed and lovely in a way that makes his heart ache. She extends an arm towards him. “If that’s reality,” she says, and now she really sounds quite like Clarke in a way that he doesn’t stop to ponder. “Would the dream really be so bad?”

* * *

Bellamy opens his eyes to see Clarke bent over him, curtain of golden hair framing her face and nuzzling her cheeks and chin, her lips quirked up in a smile, and thinks _he must still be dreaming_.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I watched that ep, thought of those softe “Heys” in 5x13, and Hurt Myself In My Confusion… Trust me, I constantly curse my ability to turn everything into a B/C AU too.


End file.
